rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_13c7ecfb-f2b8-5185-900b-2e8f3bbfa611">EIGHT
HARRY CLICKS THE TEMPERATURE button on his watch. Still early, but the heat is inching up, the norm for August, when Labor Day is still a couple of weeks away. Yesterday at five, it peaked at 114. Today, it could reach 108 by noon. He reaches into his bag for a bottle. Forty-five minutes ago, it could have been a frozen weapon; now it’s just plastic holding cold water, which he swigs.
Levitt has gone out the gate, to the parking lot, has popped his trunk, seeking a dry shirt, then holds his phone up in the air. “Hey, Harry, I’ve got to make a call,” he yells.
“Do what you need to do,” Harry yells back, and sits down on the weather-worn bench on the court.
Levitt usually receives and returns one or two during their matches, always a patient querying him about her recent mammoplasty, or blepharoplasty, or rhinoplasty, or rhytidoplasty, or platysmaplasty, or abdominoplasty, or gluteal augmentation—the medical terms Levitt has taught him for breast implants, eyelidlifts, nose jobs, face-lifts, neck-lifts, tummy tucks, and rounding buttocks that have fallen down or flattened with age. Levitt’s features are slightly simian and he sweats like the hairy beast that he is not, and having some of the work he performs on others executed on his own visage and body would not be amiss, but it is impossible to feel sorry for the plastic surgeon in such demand that he is located on the court for matters involving not life or death, but vanity. He is the most pleasant doctor Harry has ever known and Levitt says it’s because the work he does is nearly 100 percent elective, only a tiny smattering medically required, and as a result, he rarely tangles with insurance companies: he’s paid up front and in full before he ever numbs an area or puts someone under and lifts the finest of scalpels, ready to perform his surgical-artiste magic. As Levitt’s Maserati demonstrates, he is cleaning up in his business of smoothing and sanding and defatting and plumping Palm Springs women of a certain age, of which there are many. Men, too, more and more, as Levitt always reminds him.
Harry swigs again, feeling pleased with the way he’s playing, keeping Levitt running, even if the memory of those dachshunds is still rolling around in his head. That might be the worst thing he’s done in his life, leaving those dogs behind, tearing out his young daughters’ hearts. Still, the girls survived, and all his children are healthy and happy, frequently phoning to fill him in on the progress of their lives, visiting regularly. He’s done right by his children, whom he loves so much, done right by them all of the time, except for that lapse in judgment regarding King David and Queen Esther.
Levitt, leaning against his car, is speaking into his phone, one hand moving slowly up and down, as if compressing the air, a gesture Harry recognizes as Calm down. Some matron is worried about something. From what Levitt has told him, he’s never botched a procedure or a surgery or been sued for malpractice; the toughest thing about what he does is convincing people they need to be patient, that swelling requires time to subside, that stitches will dissolve as they should, that bruising will fade, leaving behind vulnerable pink skin as unblemished as a baby’s, that they will, eventually, be exactly as they desire.
Harry understands that need people have for reassurance, to be told many times that everything will be okay.
And that’s exactly what he told that young Owen Kaufmann from the Palm Times.
That dealing with closed countries, secretive emigration quotas, malfunctioning airports, armed military, corrupt officials, extreme weather, and all the other details that attend moving Jews from around the globe to this patch of arid heaven is often easier than providing the necessary calm to families breathlessly checking off days until they have the proper paperwork in hand, are boarding a plane, stretching their necks to view the despised countries they are finally leaving behind, itching to begin their new lives awaiting them here in Palm Springs. No matter the education provided about what to expect and no matter how clear Harry’s people on the ground have been, he must calm them again when they land, are taken to their new home, and discover it is not the sprawling house plus pool of their dreams, but an acceptable apartment near to the very decent first jobs he has found them. And that when they were told they would be living in the desert, it meant a dry place that is usually hot or hotter or hottest, and the items they’ve packed into their bulging, double-strapped suitcases, like snowsuits and fleece-lined boots, would no longer be required. Acclimating to the heat takes time, they are all repeatedly told when still in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, Belarus, Moldova, Bulgaria, Czechia, Slovakia, and, lately, China. And he tells them again when they arrive, but they can’t really understand the notion of desert heat
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